The Midwife (14 page)

I watch the two of them and know from the burning sensation behind my eyes that I am about to cry. I glance away from the odd, fine-looking pair and wipe my face. “You’ll make a wonderful mother,” I whisper, mourning all the opportunities I had to be a mother to these girls and instead chose to protect myself.

The moment I say this, it is as if the warm room constricts. The muscles of Amelia’s shoulders bunch high around her neck. The knuckle above her ring stands out as she clenches the countertop. She retracts her arm from around the child and helps him to the floor. Sweeping some minuscule crumbs from the counter, she brushes them into the sink.

“Did I say something wrong?”

Amelia about-faces and folds her arms. “No.” Looking down at the countertop, the young woman trails her ragged nail along a crack Lydie’s numerous coatings of mineral oil cannot heal. “It’s just that . . . I’m not sure I’m
ready
to be a mother.”

I look at Amelia a long moment, as my mind’s eye replays the terror I felt when I realized I was carrying my son. I can feel the protective hedges coming down and my heart opening up to her like a bloom. I cross the space between the island where I stand and the countertop against which Amelia leans. As I do, holding the lamp, I know I am in the midst of crossing so much more. I, Rhoda Mummau
 
—head midwife, yet wife and mother to
none
 
—am crossing an emotional divide I have never been able to traverse since the winter afternoon my daughter was taken.

“My
meedel
,” I say, using Fannie’s Pennsylvania Dutch endearment. I reach out to place my hand over Amelia’s small, pale hand clenching the countertop. “You’re a mother already.”

The next morning, the duet of Looper’s bass and Alice’s soprano laughter streams out of the open windows of his truck. The resonant sound chokes me as much as the dust the truck tires have churned. In my pride, I refused Looper’s offer to drive Alice and me to Deacon Graber’s. The two of us have not spoken since the altercation in the barn, and I did not want to ride along as the unwanted third wheel. However, suddenly, I am not a forty-two-year-old woman, but a lonely teenager watching Ernest Looper drive down the dirt road running past our farmhouses with another beautiful girl seated beside him. Another beautiful girl who will never be me.

I fold my arms and breathe deep, trying not to feel hurt. Looper has been avoiding me these past two weeks
 
—not because of the altercation in the barn, but because I told him about the child we conceived together, the child I gave away without his awareness or consent. I know I deserve his anger; I would be angry too. But I am not ready to face it . . . or him. Therefore, a part of me wants to keep walking past the Grabers’ old homestead that is now their son’s,
past Fannie and Elmer’s simple gravestone embedded in the knoll beneath the black walnut trees. I want to keep walking for miles, leaving behind this place and the people in it, all of whom I love so much and seem bound to lose.

If I’d kept our son, Looper,
I find myself asking, staring at the jolting flatbed of his truck,
would everything have changed?

I remember how much courage it took to put on the dress whose uneven hem I’d stitched myself. To pin my hair into curls and darken my eyelids with shadow. To spray my neck with the Shalimar perfume my mother had left behind and stare at myself in the mirror, seeing her face reflected back, and yet not knowing where she was.

“Don’t you look nice?” my father had said when I’d come downstairs after finally drying my tears and smoothing my parents’ bed, on which I had been crying. He even looked away from the TV to admire me.

I winced at his words, though everything I did was a silent plea for his spoken approval. But at that time, I was filled with so much anger that I inadvertently deflected it toward my father, despising him almost as much as the person
 
—my mother
 
—who had abandoned us both.

My father set the remote on the threadbare couch cushion he and my little brother shared and rose. “Is Ernest picking you up?” he’d asked, walking across the living room.

I shook my head. “I’m meeting him there.” Another lie. I had told him Looper was my prom date. I could not bear the thought of him feeling bad for me, knowing I was
attending the most canonized event of high school completely alone.

My father paused in front of me, then reached out as if to touch the fabric of my puffed sleeve. “Are you . . . are you wearing your mother’s perfume?” he’d said, his voice hoarse. I stepped back. His fingertips brushed air. I could tell he was not angry, but unsettled by the scent of his wife, who had left without telling him where she was going or whom she was going with. And yet he
still
kept her high school picture on his nightstand; her battered robe hanging from a hook at the back of their shared closet; the wedding ring on his hand, though she had been requesting a divorce for years. Couldn’t he see it was impossible to make our home a shrine to a woman who was not only fallible, but selfish?

The clock ticked on the mantel ledge. On TV,
Full House
’s theme song played. My little brother, Benny, happily ate popcorn
 
—one flared kernel at a time
 
—from a large cherry bowl resting on his jeans.
Benny doesn’t even care,
I thought, and immediately felt guilty. I should be glad he wasn’t haunted by a phantom memory; I should be glad he was too young to remember the nights he had awoken from a nightmare and cried himself to sleep in my arms, wishing that his real comforter would return. He was too young to remember how hard I had cried too.

I swallowed and said, “I guess I’ll . . . be going.”

My father nodded, looking down. His jaw knotted. Before he could ask to take my picture, which I knew would cause me to break down in front of him, I went
out to my car and climbed behind the wheel, being careful not to catch my dress and crinoline in the door. By the time I arrived at the gymnasium where the banquet was held, tears had washed the makeup from my face. Walking up to the double doors trailing pink and white ribbons, I dried my cheeks and felt like Cinderella stripped of her splendor before the ball had even begun.

The tense exchange with my father replayed in my mind as the music pulsed and I remained in the shadows, watching “my date,” Ernest Looper, dance with the girl on whose wrist he’d slid a carnation corsage. Three hours later, I followed everyone to the after-prom party at Ted Benson’s house simply because it was my senior prom night and I did not want to go home. New location, fewer crepe flowers, and less confetti, but the cliques were still the same: geeks, jocks, preppies, and hicks. I did not belong to any of them and so was accepted by none.

I leaned against the fridge and sipped a warm rum and Coke from a Dixie cup. Looper, in a rented tuxedo and white crew socks, moonwalked across the linoleum and took two more girls’ hearts by storm. Appalled at myself even more than him, I slipped off to the bathroom and poured the beverage down the sink but ate the fruit cocktail gummed along the bottom. I left the bathroom and sat in a dimly lit closet office, passing time flipping through Mr. Benson’s Rolodex and doodling on his yellow legal pad. After an hour, I stopped telling myself I wasn’t waiting for Looper to find me. I knew that’s exactly what I wanted and why I stayed.

When I finally awoke and fled the office, the house felt like the end of the world had taken place. The entire first floor was empty, but the lights were on and somewhere music still played. I passed through the den, squinting through the haze of leftover smoke. Dixie cups littered the coffee table. Beer cans were crushed to metallic disks. Cigarette butts were clustered on an ashtray the color of root beer. Over the hypnotic melody on the cassette player, I heard the sound of open-throat snoring. I glanced around. It seemed to be coming from a person seated in the recliner whose triangular back was facing me.

I crept around to the front
 
—afraid to walk into a cruel classmate’s trick
 
—and found my dear Casanova neighbor, Looper. His head was tilted back. His lips fluttered. His gelled hair fell over one eye as he surrendered wholeheartedly to the snore. He was not even aware that everyone else, including his corsaged prom date, had left. He was not aware of anything. I patted his cheeks, which were scented with booze and Brut cologne, and helped him to his feet. He leaned heavily on me. My arm was around his lean waist, with his jacketed arm slung around my neck. This was not quite how I had imagined it.

“What I do widout you?” he’d slurred, stumbling over the garden hose coiled in the front yard.

I dumped him in the passenger seat of my car like a sack of silage and drove with the windows down. I thought it would help Looper sober up and keep me from feeling nostalgic for how we used to be, until our social circles made us orbit in two different worlds. By the time I turned
onto our empty stretch of road hemmed in with freshly sown acres of corn, I could tell Looper was fully awake because he became quiet. The stars were bright. The moon appeared as crumbly and thin as a paring of wax.

I could have dropped Looper off. I could have acted like everything was the same as it had always been. I should have done this, I know. Yet I couldn’t, because it wasn’t the same. I was leaving. We were
both
leaving
 
—maybe not next week, maybe not in a month. But soon everything was going to change, and we were going to change right along with it. Perhaps my urgency was accelerated by the infinitesimal alcohol that had soaked into the fruit cocktail at the bottom of my rum and Coke; by my shimmering, off-one-shoulder dress that made me feel like I actually had confidence to match my clothespin curves. Perhaps by the way the stars dappled the stubble lining Looper’s strong jaw. Perhaps it was simply my heart wanting to feel the warmth of the spotlight when I’d spent seventeen and a half years clinging to cold stone walls.

I circled behind the barn and stared at the red slats whose creases were illuminated by my high beams. Taking a deep breath, I shut off the headlights. Darkness. I heard Looper’s mouth click as he prepared to ask a question, but I asked him one first.

“Will you kiss me?” My breath and courage faltered, transforming my bold request into a whisper. “Just once?”

Looper shifted, stared out at the fields . . . adjusted his seat-belt strap. But then he grinned and said, “Jeepers creepers, Beth. Thought you’d never ask.” His tone was
playful, his smile mildly patronizing in a way that made me want to either recant my request or slap him. My cheeks seared with embarrassment.

I was about to turn to hide this when Looper caught my jaw and brought his face closer. He peered into my eyes, and I watched the look in his change as if a curtain had been dropped. His pupils absorbed the gold-green of his irises. His breathing shifted from its relaxed pattern. His rough cheek brushed against my previously tear-stained one, and then he ran a thumb down my jawline before tangling his fingers in the loosened pin curls at the nape of my neck.

He touched his lips to mine. I expected him to taste of liquor, but he tasted inexplicably sweet. I expected him to pull back after one brush of lip upon lip and tell me that we should go home. But he didn’t. Instead, he popped open the passenger’s-side door and came over to my side. Opening it, he swallowed my hand in his and pulled me out of my car. He then pressed me close and whispered, asking if I would like to take a walk with him through a cornfield alight with Wisconsin stars.

Wilbur, Looper, and Alice are already seated around Fannie Graber’s old kitchen table when I knock once and come in the door. The front of my cape dress is blanched with dust from my walk down Dry Hollow Road, which led me to memory lane. Thus my face stings with the heat of that decades-old summer, and it is difficult to meet Looper’s eyes. I look around the room instead.

It pains me to see the bachelor flotsam drifting in corners. The tin dishes crusted with food next to the sink. The light struggling through the clouded windowpanes, making the once-sunny house seem more like a cave. Even at the end, when Fannie’s arthritis was so bad Elmer had to spoon-feed her like a child, she never let it get like this. But
the one concession I can give hermit David Graber is that he tends his parents’ grave like a garden: trimming grass, planting flowers, and never letting one weed take root.

Seated at the head of the table, Deacon David Graber points to the chair across from Looper. Alice sits on his other side and Wilbur at the end, though he is only our driver and it seems odd to have him here for such an important discussion. I guess Alice just wants to keep him close because he supports her viewpoint. I take the seat and square my shoulders, as if preparing for a fight. Alice pours a glass of water from the carafe and places it before me. “Thank you,” I murmur. But I do not touch the glass.

I break eye contact with Looper
 
—the first time we have looked at each other all week
 
—and glance down the table. David’s salt-and-pepper beard brushes the top of the letter he holds. At sixty-five, David is the same age his father was when I first arrived at Hopen Haus. He looks so much like Elmer, but in his pale gaze I see Fannie’s calm spirit reflected too.

Readying his voice, David says, “I’ve asked you to come today because I want to tell you firsthand what the bishops in Indiana have ruled. They’ve decided to let Hopen Haus have electricity and a telephone.”

Alice claps her hands to her chest. I turn away, toward the door, trying to stifle the panic backing up my throat.

“But
 
—” David raises a finger.

Wilbur interrupts, rolling his eyes. “What’s the hitch now?”

“Let him speak!” I snap.

“But,” David continues, undeterred, “the electricity can only be used in the examining room, for the use of ultrasound machines and such. The telephone will be installed in the barn.”

Alice’s hands lower back to the table. She clenches the edge and leans past Looper to look at David. “Only one room? But . . . but we need lighting. We need air-conditioning . . . hot water.”

“We’ve survived thus far without air-conditioning and hot water,” I retort. “I dare think we will continue.”

Looper reaches across the table and touches my hand. Of course, this is not an affectionate gesture, but a warning to guard my tongue. I do not take it well. I rise to my feet, and Looper scrapes his chair back from the table to stand as well. “Is that all you have for us, David?” I ask. When he nods, I move toward the door and lift the latch. “Then I guess
 
—”

“Rhoda,” Alice calls. “
Please.
Let’s talk about this.”

I pause with my hand on the door. Looking over my shoulder, I meet her pleading gaze. Between us, in the dim room, tension crackles as if our palms are placed on opposite sides of a plasma globe. But deep down, I know the true reason for this tension
 
—the true reason I am jealous of Alice
 
—and it goes far back before the noxious promise of telephones and electricity that hold the power to reveal my past, or even before Looper came here and Alice took notice of him. And
 
—if I am to be honest with myself
 
—he took notice of her. I have been jealous of Alice Rippentoe since that winter morning Uriah’s newborn cry cracked
through the log-and-chink walls of Hopen Haus, and in it I heard the echo of my absent son.

I drop my eyes and say, “I’ll meet you all back at the house.”

Closing the door, I step off the porch and retrace the chalky lane that I have just walked. Heat scorches my throat, but I continue walking down Dry Hollow Lane. I take a left at the old logging trail and glance behind me. The July sun has slaked its thirst on any moisture the rain has left behind. My boots stamp prints in the dirt.

I am trespassing on property the community sold to Walt Hollis when it heeded the siren call of better jobs and larger parcels of land in Indiana. But I have traversed it so often, it still feels like somewhere I belong.

My body is a scythe cutting through the field studded with milkweed pods and thistles topped with soft purple down. I keep going until I come upon, not Fannie Graber’s grave, where I considered going first, but the Ashinhurst plantation graveyard, whose gothic beauty is encircled by a modern chain-link fence. The graves are covered with ancient charcoal stones that shield the remains of those who defended their property against drought, termites, fire, Union troops trying to claim the land, and Confederate bushwhackers marauding after the land was conquered. These people
 
—the Ashinhursts
 
—lived, loved, and died beneath Hopen Haus’s roof. They had sorrows just like we do; they wept just like we do.

I chose to come here because I want to pay homage to the ones who have kept Hopen Haus whole through so
many hardships, and to apologize for now not being able to keep it the same. Most of the names and dates on the graves have been smoothed by weather and time, and even if I wanted to enter to try and read them, I can’t. The gate is locked, the bolt fused with disuse. When I first arrived at Dry Hollow Community and did not know the church had selected a grave plot of its own, I had hoped to be buried in this cemetery where the Ashinhurst family had found a final place of rest. But at that time I had a family, even if it was composed of just my unborn daughter and me. Since I am alone, I do not want to become a few specks of dust scattered across the bottom of a cedar-lined box, buried in the backwoods of nowhere.

Midwifery has been fulfilling in so many ways, and I know that I should be grateful for what I have. Nevertheless, suddenly, I’m not even sure what I want, or 
who
I want, or why it feels that I am lacking. I just know that right now I cannot imagine remaining here, at Hopen Haus, where my job is to bring other women’s children into the world while never having a child or a family to call my own. Maybe Ernest Looper’s arrival has made me see just how much time has gone by, and that I am no longer the fractured young woman who threw caution to the wind so she could glimpse her entirety reflected in another person’s eyes.

Covering my face, I blink hard and straighten, peering through the rusty diamonds of the fence. I stare at the graves, the reminder of mortality making me feel both anchored and weightless, and then turn to head back up
the logging trail that meets the whitened lane. But as I do, my peripheral vision catches movement. I squint against the sun and perceive that Ernest Looper has followed me. The German shepherds are positioned on either side of him. Despite their aging forms and arthritic hips, their black-and-tan shoulders slinking through the waist-high grasses remind me of lions. Crossing the distance, Looper comes to stand before me. The dogs sit beside him, panting, but their tails lash the ground.

“You all right, Rhoda?” Looper says. His face is devoid of a smile.

My head is still swirling with memories of that starlit Wisconsin night. I step back. “How’d you find me?”

“Shoe prints.” Looper wipes the sweat dripping past his temple.

I search my mind for a topic less combustive than the one we discussed at Deacon Graber’s or the one we discussed that night at the hospital when we last allowed ourselves to speak. “How’s the remodeling coming?” I point beyond the field to Hopen Haus, where the roof’s new tin patches glimmer through the trees.

The sun skulks out from behind a cloud. Looper shields his eyes, but not before I can feel their blistering hurt. “Going well,” he says. He clears his throat. “Now that I know what you want, I can probably be out of your hair in two weeks.”

This time
I
am the one who averts my gaze. I don’t know what I want; I don’t know anything. I rip a hank of grasses out by the roots. The sweet, green chlorophyll
oozes out of the long blades and stains the creases of my fist. Looking down at my ragged nails and cracked skin, I wonder if there is anything left in me that is womanly and fragile. Anything left in me that will truly let someone in. I open my hand and watch the yellow seeds scatter on the breeze.

“And who’s to say that I want you to leave?” I swallow hard, knowing that with vulnerability, there is also great risk.

Looper hangs his head. “I don’t know what you want from me, Beth. I just know that you don’t want me here.”

I turn my back to him and cross my arms over my chest. “Rhoda . . . now Beth?” My voice shakes. “Why do you keep switching names?”

Looper is quiet for such a long time, I have to force myself not to look over my shoulder at him. Then he says, “’Cause sometimes I can see that little girl
 
—that Beth
 
—inside you, still feeling guilty for something she hasn’t done. When I see her, that’s when I know . . .”

He clasps my hand and turns my body toward his. “That’s when I know that I have to forgive you for giving away our son because you’re already blaming yourself for something you couldn’t have changed.”

With one finger, Looper lifts my downcast face. The movement is gentle, but I can feel the smoldering frustration that I know he is trying to quench. “Your mom’s leaving had nothing to do with you, Beth.” He holds my eyes. “She made me promise to tell you that.”

My throat tightens. Looper wraps his arms around my
back, drawing me into his exhibition of forgiveness. This is the closest we have been since he arrived. The closest we have been in decades. He smells of sweat and pine and something akin to sadness. But my own grief dulls any age-old magnetism, and I am only aware of the comfort of his familiar embrace.

“If it wasn’t my fault,” I say, “then why’d she leave?”

Beneath my hands, Looper’s muscles grow taut. He looks over my head, and then stares down at me. “Your mother . . .” Looper scratches one hand across his beard and swallows. “Your mother tried to stay for you and Benny, Beth, but she and your dad had grown apart. He wouldn’t give her a divorce, so she just . . . left.”

Surprise stings my eyes as the revolving door of my mind entraps one thought:
She didn’t leave because of me.

Looper holds me against him, and I remember how my father used to hold my mother, as if his arms could repel the force field of my anger toward her. At twelve years old, I could sense my mother’s discontent and resented her for stripping away my security at the cusp of my teenage years when I needed her support the most. But perhaps my father wasn’t trying to protect my mother from me; perhaps he also sensed my mother’s unrest lurking beneath her serene smile and was trying to keep her close to prevent her from breaking our family apart. Not knowing that, in five years, his daughter would follow in her mother’s footsteps by heeding the urge to flee rather than remaining and taking the risk of getting hurt.

Moving out of Looper’s embrace, I can feel
self-preservation erecting its barricade around my heart. If Looper didn’t love me when I was seventeen and our lives were so connected, he surely does not love me now, when I am just a husk of the person he once knew. I now understand why he sought me out here, at Hopen Haus. He came to unburden an old friend by telling me it wasn’t my fault that my mother had left. Nothing more, nothing less.

I step away from him and take the desolate trail, which will lead back to the lane that, eighteen years ago this summer, brought me to Hopen Haus. In the background, dogs bark. Looper calls out, asking if I’m all right. He calls my name
 
—my
given
name
 
—Beth, Beth, Beth. But I am crying too hard to stop. I begin to run, my cape dress fluttering with the breeze. For now I know it is time to let go of the past. It is time to let go of the bitterness toward my mother, but also of the hope that I did not know I was holding on to until I was certain it was already gone. The hope that a barren midwife could have a husband and a child of her own. The hope that there would ever be a future left for Looper and me, a future left for us.

I crouch toward a hen that spreads her wings and hunkers low, guarding her eggs like treasure. I dart my hand beneath the feathers and feel a hard orb. The hen rises on her claws and squawks. Beating her wings, she fills
the coop with swirls of hay and darts her head out of the shoe-box cubicle to peck my hand. Jerking back, I scream and crack the shell against the side of the coop. Two weeks ago I would’ve cursed or at least made a scene. But now I just wipe my fingers off on my shirt, toss the egg into the basket, and go down to the next hen. (Maybe prairie-girl Lydie’s having more of an influence on me than I thought.)

This time, I make vague “shoo shoo” motions, trying to get the hen off the nest. The hen remains. Her yellow eyes and hooked beak wink in the barn’s dingy light. Rubbing the puncture on top of my hand, I try to be more aggressive in my shooing
 
—a little closer this time, but still out of pecking reach. The hen stretches its beak into a yawn. Out of options and running low on time, I bend my arms into wings, cluck my own tongue, and stamp my feet. Despite my two-hundred-dollar jeans and my pointe skills, I look like a performer at one of those old-fashioned hoedowns, doing the chicken dance.

Then something or somebody blocks the sunlight coming in through the barn’s open doorway. A shadow falls across the coop. My jig for the bored red hen stops. Groaning inside, I turn. Uriah Rippentoe is standing there. His arms are folded. His mouth is straight, but the tilted corners make me think he’s trying not to smile. “How difficult is it to gather eggs?” he says, swaggering into the barn and glancing at the straw bale, where my basket’s sitting empty, except for the single cracked egg. “You’ve been down here, like, what? An hour?”